Review of “The Nature of Love”: Monia Chokri’s brilliant romantic comedy

The task of finding an intellectual definition of love – a feeling so indescribable and transcendent that empires have collapsed and countless lives have been shattered simply because people have longed for something more of it – is by definition an impossible task. It is a feeling that inspires so much art Because it cannot be explained or rationalized. At its best, it is so overwhelming that even the smartest among us have no choice but to suppress their need for analysis and accept that they have fallen victim to a feeling that can be better summed up in a three-minute pop song than in any textbook.

Yet the impossibility of this task has not stopped the great thinkers of every generation from trying. From the ancient Greek philosophers who argued that love cannot be separated from unfulfilled sexual desire and obsession, to more modern interpretations that see it as a state of being that must be actively cultivated, it is hard for an intellectual to resist the temptation to reduce the most powerful feeling known to man to mere words.

In The Nature of Love, Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau) may not be arrogant enough to put her own definition out there, but she spends her life studying the attempts of those who came before her. As a professor who teaches philosophy to seniors, she can constantly indulge her curiosity about the conflicting definitions of love that have circulated throughout human history. But all the Plato and bell hooks quotes in the world haven’t been enough to keep the spark alive in her own bedroom.

For the past decade, she has lived a comfortable life with a perfectly nice man. Xavier (Francis-William Rhéaume) is the kind of man who would ask his wife’s permission to enter his bedroom to show her an article about the dangers of the Trump presidency. With his good manners and self-deprecation, he can hold his own in salons and dinner parties with all of her intellectual friends while ensuring that Sophia is never in the spotlight. It’s a reasonable arrangement, but hardly nourishing for someone who spends his days reading about the men who lost their minds and waged wars over passionate affairs.

Like any decent French society lady faced with the prospect of a boring marriage, she decides to start an affair. She quickly falls in love with Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), a building contractor working on the couple’s vacation home who embodies everything her husband is not. While Xavier is quick to joke about his inability to make even the most minor repairs, Sylvain is unperturbed by any task that can be done with two hands. He may miss Xavier’s interest in current events and politically correct buzzwords, but he passionately declares his love for Sophia, without leaving out or hiding a single detail. When he’s not banging her, he writes her embarrassingly sincere poems without feeling an ounce of embarrassment. She is completely smitten.

Xavier is so respectful that he can’t even muster enough backbone to politely ask his wife not to cheat on him. So it’s not long before Sophia runs off with Sylvain, throwing her husband out of the game completely. But their euphoric bubble of spontaneous sex and cozy nights in their forest cabin soon bursts when it’s time to take her new boyfriend out into the real world. Her laptop class friends applaud her decision to sleep with a hot commoner in a condescending, noble, wild way, but Sophia’s attempts to unite her two worlds quickly remind her why so many people put their passion aside and marry the “safe” partners in the first place. For all the passion Sylvain inspires in her, she soon finds herself mortified by his poor grammar and mildly disgusted by his uneducated relatives. The unspoken social pressure becomes so strong that she even considers meeting Xavier again, as she is forced to balance her conflicting desires for security and excitement.

Monia Chokri’s brilliant film is one of the sharpest cinematic examinations of the paradoxical expectations we place on our relationships in the 21st century. Sophia’s on-off affair is sporadically interrupted by her university lectures on the multitude of theories philosophers have invented to explain the feeling of love. And while many of them seem to blatantly contradict each other, it eventually becomes clear that every single cliche is true. What we call romantic love exists at the messy intersection between the evolutionary wiring that drives us to reproduce, centuries of increasingly complex man-made social norms, and a bit of that indescribable magic that people spend their whole lives waiting for.

As Sophia tries to reconcile her transcendent urges with her hilariously mundane circle of intellectuals and overanalysts, she learns the most painful lesson an extremely privileged person can learn in our increasingly hedonistic world: You can have almost anything, but you can’t have it all. Love can be an all-consuming fire that burns hot enough to burn the whole world while giving you enough butterflies in your stomach to make the cost worth it, or it can be an active decision to share life with another person and help each other through the hardships and mundanities that life inevitably brings. The only problem for most people is that it can’t be both.

Grade: A-

“The Nature of Love,” a new release from Music Box Films, is currently playing at the IFC Center in New York City. The film will also come to Los Angeles on Friday, July 12.